GETTING PUBLISHED: LESSON 1

JUST BE SURE YOU REALLY WANT IT

         My first novel - backed with another by the considerably more gifted Lin Carter.

   The Lost Chord, one of the less jolly creations of Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), begins "Sitting alone at the organ, weary and ill at ease."

            In this spirit, browsing Substack, I came across Kate McKean's Books + Agents,which attempts to address that most frustrating question of the new writer, "How do I get published?"

            After forty books, I'm no wiser than when I began in 'sixties Australia. But my experience may encourage someone facing the same challenges.

            Fleeing from life in a country town, I left school at fourteen, took a job with the New South Wales Government Railways, and, being unencumbered by family, was soon being sent to the furthest corners of the state, there to fill in for a few weeks while others took vacations.

            Most towns fitted a description written by American environmental writer Edward Abbey. "This tiny outlier of what is called the modern world sits alone at the centre of an enormous flat, red, empty circle of sand, dust, meandering dry stream beds and open space. No hills, no woods, no chimneys, no towers of any kind break the line of the clean, bleak horizon."

            Unless someone offered their spare room, I stayed in the local hotel. Generally the largest building in town, two storeys high, its overhanging balcony was supported by posts to which locals could tie their horses. Few got further than the public bar, which roared into the early hours with men in khaki shorts and cotton vests downing tumblers of gullet-numbingly iced lager.

            I never travelled with fewer than a dozen books. Most were science fiction, to which I was devoted. I even corresponded with Ted Carnell, editor of New Worlds, the leading British sf magazine, who printed a couple of my letters. How few hotel guests read could be judged from the bedside lamps, which illuminated only a saucer-shaped space on the side table, forcing one to use the yellow light of the unshaded ceiling fixture, attracting constellations of giant insects that zoomed and clattered overhead.

            What turned out to be my last such posting took me to an industrial city a hundred miles from Sydney. The office was sited inside a foundry. To reach it I had to cross the enormous casting floor. Molten metal poured from a cauldron the size of a house into a maze of moulds, an image out of some Victorian industrial hell.

            As I arrived, the three other men in the office were shrugging on their coats. “I'll take you down to the trailer park,” the boss said. “Then we can have a beer."

            "What trailer park?"

            "They didn't tell you? There are no pubs around here, so we put you in a trailer. They keep a few empties for blokes like yourself."

            The trailer park stood by the busy freeway. It was empty aside from a brick toilet block and a scatter of obviously unoccupied trailers. Staring around the bleak interior of one such, and in particular at two bed-sized slabs of foam covered in green Naugahyde, I asked "Where am I supposed to sleep?"

            The boss said thoughtfully "They told me bedding was supplied."

            "Is there a manager?"

            "On site? No. Look, I’ll send someone down with some blankets and a pillow." He checked his watch. "Let's get to the pub. It'll be closing time soon."

           I ate a repellent burger at a diner half a mile away. The only cinema was showing a horror movie which I'd seen six months before and didn't like then. Of bookshop or library, there wasn't a sign.

            No bedding materialized, so I slept in my clothes, sandwiched between the slabs. Next morning, some shouting and arm-waving produced blankets, dishes, pots and pans, but I returned from Sydney after the weekend aware that any entertainment for the next three weeks was down to me.  

At the last minute, I packed my portable typewriter. At least I could catch up on my correspondence. I began with a letter to Ted at New Worlds, commenting on the low quality of his last issue. For heaven's sake, I could write as well as some of the people he was publishing.

            An idea struck me. Why not, as a joke, write such a story? How hard could it be? I'd read enough of them. I wound a blank sheet of paper into the machine…

            Some weeks later, back in Sydney, I collected my mail. One letter was from Ted. I tore it open. It contained a brief note - and a cheque.

In better company than I deserved,

            You will think it false naivete, but it never occurred to me that my story, written in jest, might get published. I was a fan, not a writer. Writers were…well, what were they?  A few days later, I put the question to a friend who worked for a small independent magazine.

            "If you seriously want to write," he said, "we could use some help here."

            So I quit the railroad, and after selling some more science fiction stories and writing for my friend's magazine, I finished a science-fiction novel, which Ted Carnell serialized in New Worlds and, since he moonlighted as an agent, sold to Don Wolheim at Ace in New York… and so it goes.

            What does my experience say about getting published? Not much, perhaps. Except that there are no rules, and that, as screenwriter William Goldman said of Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything."

            Talking of screenwriting, remind me to tell you how I wrote my first film. I was with a friend at the Sydney Film Festival and after we'd watched a couple of short films, I said "You know, we could make a film at least as good as these…."

AFTER PROUST. Directed by Christopher McGill. Written and produced by John Baxter. First prize for a short film, Australian Film Awards, 1968.